re.web - The William & Mary Web Redesign

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Beginning August 1, 2008, we move from project to process. W&M's website will evolve and improve as we work to offer interesting, informative and engaging content for our visitors. To make this happen, we will continue to rely on all of you - the talented people who love the College.

This is our final post on this blog - we hope you'll visit our new blog.

Until we meet again, just close your eyes and click your heels together three times.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Yes! The new W&M website is launching on Thursday. With any takeoff, there comes a bit of turbulence. Don't be alarmed if you are directed to a page you didn't expect or if you receive the ever comforting "page not found." You can expect some flakiness with links while we transition. We'll be dodging those air pockets as quickly as we can.

Please don't evaluate the quality of the search results from the new site right away. Search engines may take until Monday to catch up.

Send an email to web@wm.edu if you find errors after Thursday. We appreciate your patience through this transition.

We are having a great time here at W&M Operation Launch! Our camp counselor, Reverend Blair, is making us all write to our families in case you saw the 404 page and worried. We are OK. Only 1 new page and 2 table layouts got washed away. Luckily, none of us realized because we were all arguing about web-safe colors when it happened.

Oh yes, please call Tina's mother and tell her she is OK. She can't write because she is way too busy cleaning up HTML. I got to learn some new unix commands today. It was neat. Roger won't let me use the rm -rf * - he's so mean. Mr. Tyler got mad at Mark for going on a Google search alone without telling anyone. Mark said he did tell him, but it was during the database failure so he probably didn't hear him.

Norborne isn't crabby like some camp directors. He didn't even get mad about the broken links. He can be demanding though. He asked Andrew to draw a new map of camp (with new driving directions) and give it to you after you get here.

We will be home on Friday if (when!) the new website launches. Lord Boutetort told Joel that with a site that old you have to expect something to look weird in IE. Do you think we could get everyone to use Firefox?

I have to go now. We are locking ourselves up in Blow 311 again today. Don't worry about anything. We are fine. Can you send more Fig Newtons? We ran out.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Yesterday, we got the word that the re.web blog was named the People's Choice Winner. Since we're busy launching a website, we weren't on hand to receive the award at the eduWEB conference. (Missed a trip to Atlantic City!)

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

We officially begin the soft launch of our new website today. In fact, you can already go to http://preview.wm.edu to see the new site. Readers of this blog are perhaps finding out about the soft launch address early, before our provost sends a message about it to the campus.

If you’ve been to a soft opening of a restaurant, then you probably get the idea of a soft launch. Giving W&M faculty, staff and students a chance to preview the new site is a lot like being invited to a pre-opening of a new restaurant - when the staff are still in training. You can tell it’s going to be great – but they’re still working out the kinks.

Our new website is mostly done but during the next 10 days we’ll put on some finishing touches and fine tune some things. And, to continue the metaphor, like a restaurant, we’ll have some specials on opening day.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

During the past few weeks, we created and posted a new position for the W&M web team. Lucky for us, Mark C. Windley has accepted the position of Web Project Manager/CMS Administrator. Based on his strong technical background and project management experience, Mark was the ideal candidate for this new job.

Here are a few other pluses about Mark that "factored into his promotion."

He's a William and Mary grad.(Enough said.)

He has two bachelor's degrees - one in fine arts and one in computer science.(How cool is that).

As predicted by the above, he's a great writer.(Re-read his post about LEGOs.)